You wore scarlet and gold, a Red Raider not a Little Lion, but we still cheered for you-
or maybe at you-

because you were one of us, more here than there, migrant with a visa from a no hotel
hick town thirteen miles away.

We cruised top down in your fin-tailed Ford hurling eggs at college students ”Light my
Fire” blaring from the radio, you cackling hysterically

as I stood, dropped drawers and hung a moon—so wicked to whomp on the gas, the
blacktop blistering my bare butt.

Yours was named ‘Winston’ like the cigarette because “Winston tastes good,” mine was
‘Howie,’ a howitzer sadly never more than test-fired,

while poor Tom, poor nihilistic Tom, was resigned to dying a virgin; his melancholy
member’s moniker— ‘Nothing.’

We dreamed of “California Girls,” our pea-green Pennsylvania lake filled with fornicating
frogs and scaly-skinned trout a piss poor substitute for

Malibu’s women and waves, just like our pale, pudgy pre-pubescent bodies couldn’t
compete with toned tanned Baywatch torsos, as we sadly learned

retching Fizzies and peanut butter on a road trip to Virginia Beach, virgin voyeurs
genuflecting before the sacred “itsy bitsy teeny weeny

yellow polka dot bikini”—that turned our pickles to zucchini…but we could only ogle
and drool, stammer and stutter, gape at those golden goddesses. You chose a party school, majored in tailgating, tokes, and toga parties, toasted your 21st for
60 straight midnights on the same bar stool,

that stool embossed 30 years later with a brass plaque saluting your laborious lifelong
ascent from Rolling Rocks to Chivas Regal rocks,

the plaque indelibly imprinted on your burgeoning buttocks as you returned year after
year to its warm if cheeky embrace.

I entered a military school, Vietnam prep for patriots—parades spitshined shoes and
punishment tours—but your fraternity brothers still

welcomed us barbaric buzz heads to your weekend bacchanalia whenever we could
escape Patton’s Prison, the Eisenhower Tower, that is until

the hit show “Graduates into Grunts’ made the mellow Maui Wowie in Montreal your
mandatory move, travel courtesy of Jefferson Airplane, but

ka-boom—reality ruptured your dreamscape soon enough: Marriage, two kids, twelve
relocations in twenty years climbing the corporate cargo net

created cracks in the conjugal cocoon but neither you nor she ever let the growing
divide between you, “A Total Eclipse of the Heart,”

puncture the protective bubble you built around them, mom’s and dad’s mutual
indisputable masterpieces, even as you

set your sights on Fortune 500 heights first with a friggin’ fracking company drinking
the company kool-aid, ablution for all the pollution,

then bingo a big buyout and you boogied on to biotech even though you had failed
biology in Mrs. Butler’s seventh grade class,

the less you knew the better because your job was to pump out pablum to politicians
and the public, persuade people pyrite was gold, rocketing you

into the realm of corporate jets and five-star restaurants, hovering between humility and
hubris, sometimes an avatar

sometimes an asshole but regardless you never really believed you belonged ‘there’ or
knew if you even wanted to be ‘there,’

any further introspection bulldozed by a greed is good America as you pledged
allegiance to LeverageLand- think Legoland on quicksand-

retired to that gated lakefront enclave long lusted after, petrified of being found out,
exposed as a fraud, an escapee from the working class.

Ensconced among the elite of corporate Camelot, with time and Benjamins to burn,
you borrowed and borrowed and borrowed,

spun the wheel again and again and again, Russian roulette with bullets in every
chamber, just another naive neophyte

nibbled then swallowed whole by hedge fund hammerheads and barracuda bankers until
the lords of LeverageLand slammed the gates behind you.

You were penniless, too old to be considered for the jobs that needed you, but the pit
bosses of life’s casino were not yet finished,

malignant goons tumouring through your brain until nothing was left except memories
of what had been, the crushing certitude of what would never be.

The last time I saw you was Thanksgiving at your daughter’s house, blanketed pale and
shivering on the sofa, fading in and out,

encircled by friends and family ostensibly focused on football, turkey and its trimmings,
the endless chatter no one heard,

but when my dreaded moment to leave arrived, you somehow struggled to your feet,
staggered, then smothered me in your blanket,

an endless hug still too short, both a panicked plea and an unuttered promise that
someday we’d fly that fin-tailed Ford again,

hair flowing in the wind, your more pathetic than plaintive teenage tenor warbling “Do
you love me surfer girl,”… and my bare butt riding shotgun